Wednesday’s Suriname Elections: No Small Matter

• Sparsely populated South American nation of
Suriname will hold general elections on May 25, attracting
the attention of international players ranging from the
Netherlands and Brazil to the United States.

• The
opposition National Democratic Party (NDP) has accused the
U.S. of interfering in the country’s electoral process.

•
Suriname could become the next member of the new left
movement that is sweeping across South America.

• The
NDP’s candidate as well as the country’s former president,
Désiré Bouterse, is viewed with deep suspicion by the
international community but he is not without friends.
Bouterse ruled the former Dutch Guiana during the 1980s and
was responsible for ordering the murder of 15 government
dissenters in 1982. He was tried by a Dutch court in
absentia and was sentenced to 11 years for cocaine
trafficking to the Netherlands.

• Suriname’s elections
could turn out to be the first tough test for newly
appointed Organization of American States (OAS)
Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza.

Suriname’s May 25
general elections could prove disappointing to many as the
likely winner could be former dictator Désiré Bouterse, a
convicted drug smuggler who was also responsible for dozens
of deaths in the 1980s. Celebrating the 30th anniversary of
its independence from Holland this year, Suriname deserves a
qualified president who is both able and morally fit to
govern, which would rule Bouterse out of the
race.

Electoral HistoryA former Dutch colony that
obtained its independence in November 1975, Suriname has
experienced a turbulent history. A group of 16 young
military officers, including then Sergeant Major Bouterse,
assumed power in 1980 and proceeded to install a
pathological version of the rule of law in the unstable
post-colonial country. Although for two years a civilian
government claimed to be in charge, it was the military that
called all the shots. Bouterse formally became head of state
in 1982, when he created the all powerful National Military
Council, and with its backing, ruled the small country with
an iron fist until 1988. Among the multiple allegations
against Bouterse was that he authorized the murders of 15
political opponents who were transported to a forest zone in
a bus and shot in the head at point blank range. He also has
been tied to atrocities committed against Suriname’s Maroon
ethnic group. In 1986, 35 people, mostly women and children,
were murdered during an attack in Moiwana, a Maroon village.

The Netherlands cut diplomatic relations with its former
colony after this gruesome massacre and also froze its
bounteous economic assistance program. Following the 1987
elections, a new civilian government led by President
Rameswak Shankar took office. However Bouterse continued to
function as military commander under nominally civilian
rule. Suriname’s main political parties agreed to two new
constitutional articles which gave the armed forces,
described as the "vanguard of the people," a virtual carte
blanche to intervene in domestic political matters. Before
long the country’s political parties were lamely reverting
to racial and class polemics, as Suriname’s social structure
fell into a severe paralysis.

In December 1989, the
civilian government simply evaporated after an incident
known as the “telephone coup.” At that time, one of
Bouterse's lieutenants phoned President Shankar and told him
to go home, which he supinely did. Unlike Bourterse’s 1980
coup, protests made by the Dutch, and later backed by
Washington and the Organization of American States (OAS),
hotly reverberated in Paramaribo. With his back now against
the wall, Bouterse installed an interim government and
scheduled new elections within six months to be monitored by
the OAS. The 1991 elections then brought about the ascension
of President Ronald Venetiaan, while his party, the
opposition New Front for Democracy (NFD), won effective
control of parliament. Shortly after, in 1992, Bouterse
resigned as army chief amid corruption charges.

In 1996,
the former dictator’s aide, Jules Wijdenbosch of the NDP,
won the presidency. Bouterse served as an advisor to him
while at the same time Interpol – the international
intelligence and police agency – was circulating a warrant
for the latter’s arrest. Three months after resigning his
presidential advisory position in April 1999, Bouterse was
convicted in absentia by a Dutch court of drug trafficking
and money laundering. In 1998, COHA Research Associate
Shinan Govani printed an article in COHA’s biweekly
publication, The Washington Report on the Hemisphere,
describing Wijdenbosch as “ a skilled operator and a force
in his own right [but] when it comes to Bouterse he has
nothing but a fierce loyalty.”

Public discontent over
Suriname’s 70 percent inflation rate forced President
Wijdenbosch to call new elections in May 2000, one year
ahead of schedule. Venetiaan's NFP won a resounding victory
in parliamentary elections, and in August 2000 the former
president went on to be reelected to office.

For the
upcoming balloting, three candidates are contesting the
presidency: current President Venetiaan, former President
Wijdenbosch, and current MP Bouterse. In addition, nine
political parties have signed up to campaign for the
national assembly’s 51 seats in a country of only 450,000
citizens.

The Former Dictator and the U.S.In a recent
interview with reporters at the U.S. embassy in Paramaribo,
a U.S. official stated that it would be difficult for
Washington to have normal relations with Suriname if the
president were a convicted drug trafficker. This remark,
which should not be taken as an official statement by the
U.S. government, caused a stir throughout Suriname. Bouterse
was quick to seize upon the comment, accusing Washington of
interfering in Suriname’s domestic affairs.

While
Bouterse as an individual is widely seen by the
international community as morally unfit to serve his
nation, his NDP party is currently in second place in the
polls, with 18 percent, behind Venetiaan's party's 24
percent, in the multi-party race. How can good government
and the will of the Surinamese people both be served in this
situation? While the U.S. may be correct in voicing its
apprehensions over Bouterse’s possible election to the
presidency, it still must be wary of interfering in
Suriname’s domestic politics. Washington’s role as
intervener, especially in the Caribbean, has been
particularly evident – one can only recall the 1965 invasion
of the Dominican Republic, the invasion of Grenada in 1983
and most recently, the State Department’s alleged role in
maneuvering the ouster of Haiti’s democratically elected
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

Another factor
that must further irritate the U.S. is that Bouterse was a
self-proclaimed socialist during the 1980s. However,
Washington currently may be more interested in the tiny
nation’s bauxite mining and processing industry than in the
political ideology of its head of state. This is not to say
that the U.S. has no concern in Suriname’s role as a key
center for the production and transit of drugs, particularly
MDMA – ecstasy. The U.S. has even helped train Surinamese
anti-drug squads. The 2004 version of the International
Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) has a section on
Suriname which explains how the U.S. State Department, the
Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Customs and Border
Protection have all been involved in various training
exercises with Suriname’s national customs officers as well
as the narcotics brigade of the police force (KPS). The
report explains that in May of 2003, the KPS narcotics
brigade discovered the first known MDMA-producing lab in
Suriname along with 80 kilograms of the drug. Another point
of concern is that Surinamese drug smugglers are suspected
of having negotiated with Colombia’s leftist rebel movement,
the FARC, in arms-for-drugs transactions.

OAS, CARICOM and
BrazilAccording to a Caribbean Net News report, Bouterse
proclaimed at a recent gathering of 2,000 party-followers,
that the U.S. has failed to adhere to UN Resolution 50/172,
which states that foreign countries should not interfere in
other sovereign nation’s internal affairs, such as
parliamentary elections. The NDP has asked two regional
agencies, the OAS and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), to
assist in its response to the U.S. However, it is quite
obvious that neither of these two bodies have any influence
over Washington. The CARICOM members have frustrated the
Bush administration by demanding independent inquiries into
Aristide’s ouster from Haiti to a South African exile.
CARICOM went as far as appealing to the OAS, instead of the
United Nations, in a call for assistance since the U.S. and
France (another nation accused of being involved in the
anti-Aristide cabal) are permanent members of the UN
Security Council.

When the OAS secretary-general contest
was coming down to the wire, then-front runner Insulza, as
well as Chile’s President Ricardo Lagos, visited Paramaribo
to lobby for Suriname’s vote. They did this also because
Suriname currently holds the chair of CARICOM, and President
Venetiaan’s comments are of some influence on the members of
that organization. In any case, the OAS and CARICOM have
been placed in awkward positions. CARICOM could certainly
protest the alleged U.S. interference in the approaching
vote; however, most Caribbean nations are not at all
particularly fond of Bouterse themselves, looking upon him
as a somewhat unsavory character. As for the OAS, it
recently named Ambassador Corinne McKnight from Trinidad and
Tobago to head a delegation from the organization to
supervise Suriname’s elections.

Brazil, in its emerging
position as new regional leader, is most likely closely
monitoring the elections in Suriname. Both nations became
good friends during the 1980s, while Bouterse was in power
and Brazil was under the rule of a military dictatorship led
by General João Baptista Figueiredo (1979-84). If Bouterse
were to be victorious in the upcoming elections, the
possibility of a new rapprochement between the neighboring
countries should not be ruled out, with Suriname perhaps
becoming a new domino joining the wave of New Deal-like
leftist governments now sweeping the Atlantic coast area of
South America and which is causing Washington sleepless
nights.

Holland’s Ambiguous RoleHolland, Suriname’s
former colonial ruler and heavy funder, has been cautiously
silent about the elections. The Hague, the home of the
International Court of Justice, would certainly not be
pleased about Bouterse’s all but foregone election, but it
appears that Amsterdam has given up trying to extradite him
because Surinamese citizens, under the provisions of the
country’s constitution cannot be extradited to third
countries for trial. Caribbean Net New’s Ivan Cairo recently
reported that “the European Union [of which The Netherlands
is a founding member] declined a request from Suriname to
send a mission [to observe the elections], saying that the
CARICOM member state[s] ha[ve] a good reputation of holding
fair and democratic elections hence there is no need for the
EU to send observers.” It is unlikely though that Amsterdam
will simply remain neutral regarding the elections in
Suriname. Thirty years after its independence, around
300,000 people of Surinamese descent live in the
Netherlands, 35 percent of whom were born on Dutch soil.
Migration is facilitated by the fact that Surinamese have
the right to free movement to Holland, like Dutch citizens.
Because of these open borders, Holland is a hotspot for drug
trafficking coming from Suriname. There have been several
joint operations between the two nations to tackle drug
smuggling, most notably, the recently executed “Operation
Ficus.”

Holland has several interests in making sure that
Bouterse is not elected because a new dictatorship
inevitably would mean a surge of Surinamese migrants to
Holland who claim to be political targets. Such a scenario
would continue to upset the ethnic balance in Holland, a
country which is struggling to cope with an increasing
number of migrants from the underdeveloped world flooding
its borders in huge numbers. Drug smuggling would likely
continue, if not increase, under Bouterse, not to mention
the continuation, if not expansion, of other crimes that
similarly would likely go unpunished. For example, the
International Narcotics Control Strategy Report noted that
in June 2003 Dino Bouterse, the former dictator’s son, was
convicted on charges of weapons theft from a police armory,
but was subsequently released when several witnesses either
recanted their previous testimony implicating him, or by
simply refused to testify.

The Immediate
FutureSuriname has achieved considerable importance due
to its current chairmanship of CARICOM and the role it
played in the OAS secretary-general elections. Yet the
country’s luster has somewhat dimmed because of issues of
drug trafficking and the likely election of Bouterse.

Nevertheless, the former dictator’s popularity alarms
many because of his notorious criminal career. Many believe
that Désiré Bouterse is simply not qualified to become
Suriname’s next leader. In an ideal world, he would be
soundly defeated on May 25 and immediately taken to The
Hague to pay for his crimes; however, this scenario is far
from likely.

Analysis prepared by Alex Sanchez, COHA
Research Fellow.

Additional research provided by former
COHA Research Associate, Shinan Govani.

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